For the Love of History - world history, women’s history, weird history

What if the pill you believed would save your life was slowly killing you?

In the third century, the most powerful ruler in human history, Qin Shi Huang, the first Emperor of China, was secretly drinking mercury. His court alchemists called it the Elixir of Immortality. He called it hope. History calls it the thing that killed him.

In this episode of For the Love of History, TK takes you on a journey through humanity's oldest obsession: cheating death. From the mercury-laced elixirs of ancient China to the gold tinctures of 16th-century French courts, to the blood plasma injections and cryonic freezing of today's Silicon Valley billionaires — the methods have changed, but the madness hasn't.

In this episode, we cover:

🧪 Who was Qin Shi Huang, the man who unified China and built a tomb filled with rivers of mercury?

🧪The fangshi — the alchemist-magicians who promised emperors eternal life and delivered a beautiful, shimmering poison

🧪Why at least six Tang Dynasty emperors may have died the same way

🧪Diane de Poitiers, the French royal mistress who seemingly never aged — and the gold elixir scientists found in her remains centuries later

🧪The Philosopher's Stone, Isaac Newton's secret alchemy recipes, and how the hunt for immortality accidentally built modern chemistry

🧪Why billionaires like Bryan Johnson, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos are just doing the same thing with better branding

We've been chasing this white whale for 2,000 years. And the people with the most power have always been the ones holding the vial. Some things never change.

For the Love of History is a world history, women's history, and weird history podcast hosted by TK (Tehya Nakamura). New episodes drop every week!

Subscribe, leave a review, and join the history besties community.
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Men invented high heels. Men made them a power symbol. Then men decided women should wear them instead. Classic.

In this episode of For the Love of History, we're uncovering the surprisingly bloody, surprisingly spicy history of high heels — and it starts not in a shoe store, but on a Persian battlefield.

From the cavalry soldiers of the Safavid Empire who used heels to stay mounted while firing arrows at full gallop, to the Sun King Louis XIV, who weaponized fashion to control the French nobility, to the Victorian photographers who turned heels into a symbol of femininity and desire — this is the story of how one piece of military technology completely changed its meaning over 1,000 years.

We'll cover:

👠 How Persian cavalry invented the heel as a tool of war (and empire-building)

👠Why European men adopted heels as the ultimate masculine status symbol

👠The androgynous fashion movement of the 1630s — and why men were furious about it

👠How Victorian erotica transformed heels into something else entirely

👠The engineering problem that took centuries to solve: the stiletto

👠Why heels disappeared after the French Revolution — and what brought them roaring back

Plus: why did men's fashion get so boring? And who is really to blame for uncomfortable shoes?

Whether you're a fashion history lover, a weird history fan, or just someone who has ever cursed at a pair of stilettos, this one's for you.

For the Love of History is a world history, women's history, and weird history podcast hosted by TK. New episodes every week.

Leave a rating or review if you love the show, it helps more history besties find us!

✨ Want more untold stories like this? Support the podcast and unlock bonus content over on Patreon.

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From professional fart scapegoats to the workers who literally built civilization from the ground up. Edo Japan's labor history is wild, gross, and more relevant than you'd think.

In this episode, we're diving into the worst jobs of the Edo period (1603–1868): the Buddhist nuns hired to take the blame for samurai princesses' flatulence, the night soil collectors whose poop trade kept an entire nation fed, and the leather workers whose occupation got them legally classified as non-human, a designation whose effects are still felt in Japan in 2026.

What we cover:
💙The heoi-bekuni — Japan's professional fart scapegoat nuns and why only Buddhist nuns could do the job
💛Night soil collectors — how human waste became the most valuable commodity in Edo Japan, complete with black markets, turf wars, and actual poop laws
💙The Burakumin — Japan's hidden caste, created by the Tokugawa shogunate, and why their story doesn't end with the Meiji Restoration

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Did we invent glasses, or did we invent the problem that makes us need them? 👓

From bone goggles carved by the Inuit 2,000 years ago to the forgotten woman scientist behind the lenses in your glasses right now, this is the history of eyeglasses, vision correction, and the myopia epidemic nobody is talking about.

Nearly half the world struggles to see clearly. Screen time is changing our eyes. And the story of how we got here is way weirder than you think.

In this episode, we cover:
👁️ The world's first corrective eyewear — made from bone, wood & ivory in the Arctic
👁️The 2,700-year-old Nimrud lens and what ancient Iraq knew about optics
👁️How a medieval Islamic scholar named Ibn al-Haytham cracked the science of human vision (while faking madness to survive his boss)
👁️The invention of reading glasses in 13th-century Italy — and why we don't know who made them
👁️Chinese judges who wore smoky quartz lenses in court to hide their reactions
👁️Benjamin Franklin, bifocals, and a very suspicious interest in "the views."
👁️Dr. Estelle Glancy — the brilliant woman whose 10 years of math changed optics forever, and whose name was left off the work
👁️Why 80–90% of young adults in parts of East Asia are now nearsighted — and what that means for the rest of us

Whether you wear glasses, contacts, or you're considering laser eye surgery, this one will change how you see your own eyes. (Pun absolutely intended.)
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Were warrior women real—or is that just a myth we’ve been told for centuries?

From the legendary Amazons of Greek myth to the very real Scythian women warriors, history is filled with stories of women who fought in battle. But for years, many historians dismissed these accounts as folklore… until archaeology proved otherwise.

In this episode, we uncover the truth behind the Polianitsy, explore the long-standing debate around female warriors in history, and reveal how archaeologists mistakenly identified women’s graves as male, hiding evidence of women fighters in plain sight.

We also dive into:

🗡️ The real history behind Amazons and Scythian warriors

🗡️ Why warrior women were erased from history

🗡️ The shocking discovery that a large percentage of Scythian women were warriors

🗡️ New research showing women as hunters in prehistoric societies

🗡️ How modern bias shaped what we think we know about gender roles

This is a story of hidden women’s history, archaeology, and the ongoing fight to reclaim the truth.

If you love weird history, women’s history, and debunking historical myths, this episode is for you.

✨ Want more untold stories like this? Support the podcast and unlock bonus content over on Patreon.

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